They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
> "They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:"
Err, BlueSky is enthusiastically complying with that one (as you read by clicking through to their corporate statement),
> "We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features... Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
It's bold of them to attempt to shift the Overton Window in this way ("OSA is actually moderate and we should hold it up as an example of reasonableness to criticize other censorship laws against"). That happened fast.
I think this is weirdly cynical. BlueSky isn't in favor of OSA, they're saying that the Mississippi law is radically worse.
Bluesky is the nesting place for basically every neurotic middle aged leftist who left twitter. It's sort of their team doing the OSA
The porn and gaming fans are on Reddit
Young versions of the above on Instagram.
And surprise surprise, it's in the name of "protecting children", the same thing red blooded Americans have been falling for for decades.
Some people would say "this is exactly why we can't have good things".
Who is failing to protect them from what?
“services that have a significant influence over public discourse”
This may show paranoia but all these things that are happening recently kinda add up to preparation for war.
In the tiktok ban case we know its reintroduction and passong was because it allowed criticism of Israel, at least according to the people that reintroduced it and got it passed https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/tiktok-ban-fueled-by-israe...
This proves that Bluesky isn't decentralized. Children shouldn't view pornography, but I am worried about state abuse of the controls necessary to prevent it. Every scheme that isn't full-Orwell creates black markets. They all seem to be an excuse to eventually blanket ban VPNs.
I don't think a lot of businesses could operate without VPNs. It's essential for secure remote work. I'd have to imagine the amount of lobbying against it would be quite strong
It is essential, but never underestimate government's ability to completely screw everything up with regulation. Source: "do you accept these cookies?" when device fingerprinting exists.
Wasn't Bluesky meant to be an inclusive decentralized network that does not exclude any people? How come it's able to exclude a whole state of people?
This really shows that Bluesky is yet another us based social network company. This is where I think nostr is something completely different. Yes, it can be rough and if you use it naively you may see some annoying content, but oh-boy, it is actually fairly decentralized and resistant to state level attack like this.
The reverse is true. There are other relays that are still functional as you'd expect in a decentralized network: https://zeppelin.social/
And so if you try installing the Bluesky app, how many relays does it have? And in Mississippi you now won't be install the app or you won't able to use the bluesky relay either?
I'm coming from understanding nostr - each app usually starts with ~10 relays and as you start interacting with other people it collects more paths/routes/relays (the new "outbox model"). So as soon as you install any nostr app, it's usually not affected by any single relay issue.
It's not decentralised. They also blocked a bunch of trans people criticising JK Rowling. They couldn't do that if it were truly decentralised.
IMO it's got all the bad things about centralisation and the bad things about decentralisation. The worst of both worlds. I don't bother with it.
Mastodon/fediverse and nostr (the latter despite being from the same founder) are much better.
Meanwhile, nothing has changed on Mastodon.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China. They can stop all but the most persistent users. It is just a question of how much they care to; they have the means. And most users are closer to Homer Simpson than Edward Snowden.
Mississippi would have a hell of a time convincing every ISP in the US to put up a firewall too.
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
Then we need to make every user the most persistent user. How many governments have given up because Tor Browser ships anti-censorship defaults?
technology does not work unless you use it
On a side note I have very credible source telling that China might want open up the Internet "in a matter of days"
idk how "open" would this mean but drastic changes are coming.
Mississippi can’t unless they can establish personal jurisdiction over a specific Mastodon operator. Which if that instance’s owner/operators don’t live in Mississippi, probably requires a novel application of the Zippo test [1] that’s a bit questionable for how noncommercial Mastodon tries to be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
Or they pick a few and make an example out of them.
I believe the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany."
Other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
How exactly can a website restrict itself in a single state?
They're blocking IPs that look Mississippi-ish. I assume just using Maxmind or some other IP geolocation database.
I'm near Mississippi but not in it and I'm blocked on my home network. To open the app on my phone I have to turn off with and open it while on mobile data. Once the app is open I can get back on Wi-Fi and everything works fine, so they're only checking that first time the app opens.
Badly. Anyone whose IP has recently been geolocated in that state will be swept up in the ban (and anyone with a VPN can evade it)
They don't actually care about the block or ban, they just want to put in enough token effort that a judge in the area will feel that it was reasonably done. It's performative for the legal system.
IP geolocation
Its actually really simple but its not perfect.
This proves that Bluesky is not decentralised, btw.
FWIW the only "site that goes dark" is the https://bsky.app website frontend/mobile app.
And the "block" is a single clientside geo-location call that can be intercepted/blocked by adblock, etc.
And the "block" doesn't apply to any third party clients. So that includes:
- https://deer.social (forked client)
- https://zeppelin.social (forked client + independent appview)
- https://blacksky.community (forked client + independent appview + custom rust impl of PDS + custom rust impl of relay)
And a bunch of others like:
And I could keep going. But point being there are a thousand alternative frontends and every other bit or piece to interface with the same bluesky without censorship.
And the only user facing components are the frontend and the PDS. The appview can't even see the user's IP, only the PDS it proxies through. So if you move to an independent PDS and use any third party frontend, even if you use the bluesky PBC appview, there is no direct contact/exposure to the company that could be exploited.
For a huge majority of users, Bluesky is bsky.app / apps on phones.
but Bluesky runs the API that all of these tools rely on
Bluesky is not decentralized. The AT protocol is - albeit with few large integrators besides Bluesky, but it isn't susceptible to like 51% attacks or anything so that's mostly okay.
Does it actually? (Genuine question.) The article doesn't get into specifics about how the block is implemented, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some non-trivial way around it.
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
The client checks https://bsky.app/ipcc locally on startup, and if the json object it gets contains "isAgeBlockedGeo : true" it displays the block message.
ublock origin filters can replace the contents of any page using regex.
TLDR it's a single geoloc RPC call clientside. you can just tag it with an adblock filter to kill it. Or use any third party client (my comment to OP has a bunch of them listed).
Reminder that Bluesky is not decentralized, and can be censored or bought out just like Twitter.
There are other instances running: https://zeppelin.social/
AT protocol is open source.
Bluesky is private but the underlying mechanism is OSS and accounts are portable.
Go build the replacement and people can port their accounts across.
... but any replacement you build will, in practice, have to include a single centralized "relay" that aggregates all content. Since that's a lot of content, it has to be run by a big, easily found, easily pressured organization. And everybody "porting their accounts across" means a flag day that's going to be almost impossible to organize in practice. It'd effectively be just as much work as switching to an entirely new protocol.
Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.
The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.
Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.
Can you elaborate on that? I thought you could run your own instance and your identity was in the EDID.
In theory, but is that actually the case today? I couldn't find any information about the current state of federation for Bluesky.
Contrast this with Mastodon which already has a vibrant federated ecosystem.
Most people will never learn. It's an endless cycle.
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You reap what you sow.
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Cool take. Shitting on the south is an age old American tradition. I have a hard time understanding why people gleefully have these attitudes towards fellow human beings. Does someone from Mississippi not deserve factual actual push back against these laws? If we can't fight it there, it'll be in Connecticut soon enough.
Hating on Mississippi is an age-old Southern tradition.
Unless you're from Mississippi, then you hate on Alabama.
When you consistently shoot yourself in the face despite all evidence because you believe it'll make you wiser, at some point rational people just need to point out that maybe you've blown your own head off too many times to make intelligent decisions and accept your agency for your actions. Mississippi is governed by fear, full stop. Specifically, a fear that their individual mediocrity will trickle down to their children and so they will vote to make life as difficult as possible just to make it harder for people in even lower social strata to compete with them. I've lived through decades of this stuff and watched it up close and personal.
They're SO racist that when you give them statistics about their state and their communities, the first thing they'll do is handwave them away because to them, statistics are irrelevant if they contain data regarding minorities UNLESS said statistics are there to condemn minorities. Same thing with people in different economic classes. Generalizations are there for them to make about other people, not the other way around.
Mississippi has one of the higher murder rates? Irrelevant to them because they have a higher number of black folks. Murder rates among whites in the state are high? Irrelevant because it's the poor whites who are murdering each other. At some point, you just have to accept that the conditions they're living in are the conditions they're choosing to live in and treat them accordingly.
I read the comment more as a criticism of Bluesky ("nobody actually uses it [except California liberals?]") than a criticism of Mississippi.
I live in the south bro. That was a dig towards bluesky being a shitty twitter clone.
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You could very well read that as praise for Mississippi